Of Love and Other Wars

by Sophie Hardach

  What on earth . ⁠. ⁠.!

  She slid the letter under a book and tiptoed down the corridor. Very, very quietly she turned to peek through the doorway.

  The children were sitting at two long tables, so deeply immersed in their task that they did not even speak. They had roast chicken legs or breasts before them, which they tried to carve with their elbows tightly by their sides, as if they had been glued into place. Their hands went up and down at such unnatural angles that they looked like rows of little puppets. At the far end of the room stood the puppet master himself, oblivious to Grace’s presence.

  She squinted and wished, not for the first time, that she wore glasses.

  Grace peered at the boy sitting closest to her – what was that tucked under his elbow? She squinted again.

  A paperback! Each child had a paperback wedged between ribcage and elbow!

  She burst into the dining hall.

  ‘Mr Hoffnung! What on earth is going on here?’

  A few children dropped their paperbacks in surprise.

  ‘Miss Woolman, I thought you were busy with the accounts.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad I came over to check up on you! What is this?’ She pointed at the paperbacks.

  ‘Oh. This.’ Mr Hoffnung smiled. ‘This is a method of teaching children to eat properly.’

  Grace was so aghast she let her mouth hang open. The children sat stock-still with their elbows pressed all the more tightly into their sides, shoulders hunched, forks suspended in mid-air. Thirty pairs of eyes were fixed on Grace, awaiting her judgement.

  After a deep breath, she said, ‘And may I ask where they use this . ⁠. ⁠. method?’

  ‘In Germany.’

  She glanced at the children.

  ‘Mr Hoffnung.’ It took effort to lower her voice, when what she wanted was to scream. ‘Would you mind coming to my office for a little chat?’

  As she walked down the corridor she could hear the clatter and thump of dropped forks and books start up again behind her.

  He took his favourite place by the tall bookshelf in the corner. She had noticed that he always sought out tall furniture, and indeed often created a tall group arrangement, for example placing himself between a door, a hat stand, and a bookshelf. She sensed a certain mocking intent, for while Grace was of average height when compared to her sisters or the children at Samhuinn, when she stood opposite Mr Hoffnung, as she did now, and he and his bookshelf looked down at her from their great height, she felt distinctly short.

  She asked him to sit down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, though she wasn’t sorry at all, ‘I don’t intend to criticize your methods . ⁠. ⁠.’ She stopped. Of course she intended to criticize his methods. Come on, Grace, she told herself. Show some grit. ‘The long and short of it is, we can’t have this sort of thing here. First the jam, now this . ⁠. ⁠. paperback business.’ She lightly thumped the table in what she hoped was a display of strength.

  Mr Hoffnung listened with the patience of a shadow.

  ‘You see, this is a progressive school,’ she said. ‘We do apply a lot of German methods here, you understand, but they are all progressive methods. Like those new classrooms in the treetops, or letting children roam about and discover their own equilibrium, or addressing teachers by their first—’

  Max snorted.

  Grace stood up. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You snorted.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘May I ask why you snorted?’

  ‘I snorted because your principles are upside down.’

  ‘Oh, they’re upside down, are they? Goodness, and I didn’t even notice! Perhaps you would be kind enough to rearrange them for me?’

  ‘You talk about progressive experimentation. About classrooms in treetops. About calling the teachers by the first names. I am trying to teach the children how to eat.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Once they know how to eat, once they know to choose between butter and jam, once they know how to be human, then by all means let them be taught in a tree and call you Grace.’

  Grace blushed, tripped up by the unexpected intimacy.

  ‘Well, Max, there I was thinking they already knew how to eat. Because, you see, even before you arrived here, long before you illuminated this cave of ignorance with your presence, we actually taught them how to eat. In fact, you might be interested to hear that it was me who used to be in charge of imparting good manners.’

  His lips moved slightly, but then he pressed them together and locked the reply inside.

  ‘You’ll have to concede that when you arrived here, they already knew how to eat,’ she insisted.

  He remained silent.

  ‘Mr Hoffnung? When you arrived here, the children already knew how to eat, didn’t they?’

  After a long silence, he murmured: ‘In the widest sense.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean? Do you or do you not concede that they knew how to eat?’

  She was making herself ridiculous, but there was no stopping now. No question in the world had ever been as important to her as the question of whether Mr Hoffnung, this eccentric man with jug ears and sunken eyes that could not even glance sideways, would or would not concede that her children knew, and had long known, how to eat.

  ‘I will concede that they knew how to eat like . ⁠. ⁠.’

  He fell silent again.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘If I say it you will be angry.’

  Grace bit her lips in fury. Any moment she would burst and send shrapnel of rage all over Samhuinn House.

  ‘I’m not angry.’

  ‘I’ll say it if you swear you won’t be angry.’

  ‘My people have a habit of not swearing. But I can assure you, I’m not the angry sort at all. I don’t have an angry bone in my body.’

  He looked sceptical, but eventually said slowly: ‘I will concede that they knew how to eat like . ⁠. ⁠. English people.’

  She let out a noise she didn’t even know she could make, a yelp mixed with a kind of battle cry. ‘Like English people! And is that so very terrible?’

  He opted for another silence.

  ‘I mean, I eat like an English person.’

  He did not respond.

  ‘Mr Hoffnung.’

  ‘I knew you would be angry!’

  She smacked the table. ‘I’m not angry! I merely stated the fact that I eat like an English person. You responded with a rather insinuating silence. And I would like to know, Mr Hoffnung – Max – what it is that you’re insinuating. Is there something the matter with the children’s table manners? Is there something the matter with the manners I taught them?’

  ‘You don’t put your hands on the table.’

  ‘I what?’

  ‘When you eat soup, for example, you use the spoon with the right hand and you put the left hand . ⁠. ⁠. well, I don’t know where you put it, but it’s not on the table.’

  ‘And that’s wrong, is it?’

  ‘It’s not the way we do it. When we use one hand, the other should be placed on the table, next to the plate. Otherwise . ⁠. ⁠. otherwise it could be assumed that you’re doing something peculiar with that hand.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought that far. Scratching an itch, maybe. Or feeding the dog under the table.’

  ‘The mind boggles, Mr Hoffnung. It boggles. And what else do I do that’s so repulsive to you?’

  ‘Well, let me just say that your parents were clearly not familiar with the paperback method.’

  Another yelp escaped from her. ‘They weren’t, were they? Good Lord! Would you like me to correct that? Perhaps you could lend me a couple of nice heavy doorstops to practise with? War and Peace? The Bible? Mr Hoffnung, this is frankly the most arrogant and . ⁠. ⁠. and . ⁠. ⁠. insulting thing anyone has ever said to me. And I’ll tell you one thing, you can go back i
nto that dining hall right now and collect all those books and put them back where they belong, back in the library, and then you will stop pestering us with your bizarre experiments, do you hear me? I won’t have it!’

  She slammed her hand on the table so hard that it hurt, but resisted the temptation to wince. He sat in his chair, perfectly calm, waiting for the shrapnel to settle around him.

  ‘Or I’ll tell Mr Cartland!’

  He merely crossed his arms.

  ‘The children’s table manners are perfectly fine the way they are. That’s all, Mr Hoffnung. Now if you would kindly let me get on with my work . ⁠. ⁠.’

  She shuffled her papers with such energy that half of them slid to the floor. He remained seated.

  ‘Really, Mr Hoffnung, I cannot think why you would want to inflict this on the children.’

  He stood up, walked to the door, and with his back to her, said: ‘Because their parents would want it that way.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He did not turn round. His hand was on the doorknob, but instead of opening the door, he appeared to lean against it for support. His shoulders began to shake. Had she not known that Mr Hoffnung was incapable of strong emotion, she would have thought he was crying. When he spoke, his German accent erupted like water from a burst pipe.

  ‘You asked me why I inflict the children. I do it because their parents would like them to learn good table manners. One day they will come to collect the children. One day they will walk into this dining hall. And the first thing they will see is their son sticking his elbow in someone’s eye. The second thing, their son slouches so badly his face dips in the soup. The third thing, their own son doesn’t stand up to greet them, because no one taught him that you stand up when an adult enters the room.’

  A creeping sense of unease made Grace defensive. ‘That’s your assumption. You don’t actually know how the parents would feel.’

  Without turning to face her, he continued: ‘Of course I know. The children in that dining room are from families like my own. In my family, if you didn’t finish your stew at dinner, it would be warmed up for breakfast the next morning, and then for lunch, and then for dinner, and then again for breakfast, until you finished it. If you had a shirt that was scratchy, you slept in it until you grew used to the scratchiness. You ate with your hands on the table and your elbows close to your body and you chose between butter and jam. This was our way. Now I see these children shouting and laughing with their noses in the soup bowl and their hands everywhere. I picture my mother in the room, and I ask myself, would she say these are humans or a gang of little savages? I know how these children would be brought up by their parents. You are the one, Miss Woolman – Grace – who does not know.’

  Without another word, he left the room.

  Grace rushed to shut the door behind him. She told herself that Mr Hoffnung was clearly insane, and wrong, and very, very rude. The only comfort was in the thought that she would tell Morten all about him, and they would laugh: she knew exactly how she would tell it; Morten would be in stitches.

  *

  That evening, at home, she noticed that her mother had a rather unpleasant habit of holding her spoon in her fist, like a spear. Her father had an equally unpleasant habit of puckering his lips, blowing little waves on his spoon, then sucking in the cooled soup with a tremendous slurp. Mr Hoffnung had not mentioned slurping, but it was decidedly unappealing.

  The next day, the paperbacks were back on the shelf in alphabetical order. Grace told herself she had done very well to rein in the wretched man’s more eccentric ideas. At lunch, she sat next to Inge and risked a discreet glance at him. He did sit very straight, it had to be said, though the pose looked stiff and uncomfortable rather than elegant. She suddenly wondered how Morten sat at table. She hadn’t noticed anything particular about his table manners at the tea shop.

  Then Grace almost choked on the piece of bread she was chewing.

  She had not noticed anything peculiar about Morten’s manners, but what if – oh, horror – Morten had noticed something rather peculiar about hers?

  What if Morten had looked at her and concluded that her parents had clearly never exercised the paperback method?

  She strained to remember how she had sat, how she had held her knife that morning, how she had stirred her tea, how she had sipped it. What if he had been silently repulsed by her slouching and, God forbid, slurping? She felt faint with embarrassment. Well, when she next saw Morten, he would have no cause to complain. No cause at all. She tried to pull her shoulders back and sit up straight.

  ‘Inge dear,’ she said impatiently, ‘do sit up. And that hand, really, that hand should be on the table.’

  4

  In early December, Grace was trudging through the deep snow in her sister’s old boots and her mother’s muskrat coat, a sagging leather satchel slung over her shoulder. Paul had asked her to go ice-skating with him and Charlie. From the top of the hill she could see the bare black trees brittle with frost, the snow-covered bathing hut and the white pond. A person was skating on the pond in wobbly circles, with two others watching from the bank. She squinted but could not make out more than the three dark shapes. The skater glided towards the bank and all three huddled together for a moment or so. Then one of them slowly, awkwardly, stepped on the ice, fell, got up again with the help of the others. Slowly he or she gathered confidence and ventured out alone into the middle of the pond, fell, got up, fell, got up, fell again.

  And then, with the jolting stumble of a child stepping into a rabbit hole, the person crashed through the ice.

  Grace dropped her satchel and ran down the hill. When she reached the pond, Paul was dragging a girl in soggy black clothes over the ice towards the bank. Charlie was waving his arms and shouting instructions – ‘Careful! That way!’ – but for once Paul ignored him. He had hooked his arms under the girl’s shoulders and half walked, half slid backwards over the treacherous crust. By the time he gently set her down on the bank, her wet hair had frozen and her blue lips quivered in speechless shock. Charlie pulled a flask from his bag but Grace waved him away. She hurried them, the boys half carrying the girl between them, back over the Heath to her office at Samhuinn.

  Someone had stoked the fire in the stove. Perhaps the school’s caretaker was feeling the season’s spirit of goodwill and charity: these days, Grace’s office was always warm when she arrived in the mornings. She fetched blankets and an eiderdown, helped her off with her coat, and soon Miriam’s thawing hair was dripping all over the letters and lists. Her cheeks filled with blood and her eyes grew bright with a strange, hungry vitality. She was precisely the type of girl that Grace had always envied. The type with vibrant eyes and a mouth always ready to smile; the type who crashed through the ice one minute and laughed about it the next. Grace lent her a green jumper. She noticed that on Miriam the drab garment looked original and interesting, as if she had thrown it on in a moment of happy carelessness.

  She had been doing her rounds as one of the neighbourhood’s air-raid wardens, Paul explained, and the boys had talked her into taking a break and borrowing a pair of—

  Charlie interrupted him with an anecdote from the previous winter, when Mary Pye had attempted to skate on the ice. It was a Charlie sort of anecdote, full of embellishment and exaggeration, and they all laughed rather dutifully, but Grace noticed that Miriam was not looking at Charlie at all. She was looking at Paul. For a moment the happy carelessness gave way to an expression that was earnest and still, the expression of someone contemplating a familiar figure in a new light. Then Max walked past carrying a pile of fir branches, his jug ears hidden under a red hat with white bobbles, and the moment was broken. It turned out that he and Miriam knew each other; her parents were his landlords. There was much chatting and exclaiming. Miriam touched her hair, which had dried into a frizz, and said it was high time she went home.

  Grace watched them run down the steps, Miriam skipping ahead, Paul carrying the wet coat, an
d thought how odd it had been to hear about Max’s life outside Samhuinn, to hear that he had friends and liked to play the piano until the neighbours thumped on the wall.

  On her way back to the office, she walked past him when he dropped a basket of pine cones, destined, like the branches, to decorate the breakfast room, which scattered and rolled into the furthest corners of the hallway. It was the final insult that she should be crouching in a cold hallway on her knees, picking up gilded pine cones, while others were gallivanting about outside.

  She found a silver ornament in the shape of a Christmas tree among the pine cones and held it up.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was under the impression that you were Jewish.’

  He paused. ‘And?’

  ‘Jews don’t celebrate Christmas!’

  Mr Hoffnung smiled. It was not a dry or sarcastic smile, but a warm and rather amused one. ‘Well Miss Woolman, I’m afraid this is something that would take far too long to explain.’ The smile gave way to an uncertain frown. ‘Unless, of course, you are saying that I have to explain . ⁠. ⁠.’

  ‘Oh, no, of course not. I’m sorry. It was simple curiosity, nothing more.’

  *

  ‘Dearest Morten,’ she wrote in her fifteenth unsent letter.

  The yule-tide spirit is working its wonders! Despite the strain of this strangely quiet war, we are all letting ourselves be softened a little by the mood of celebration and good cheer. Even our eccentric Mr Hoffnung appears to have yielded to the yule-tide festive spirit. The children persuaded him to act as Sugarplum Fairy in the Christmas pantomime!! I am to be a shepherd.

  Mr Hoffnung has been surprisingly enthusiastic about it. Perhaps this means we have finally buried the hatchet?? We have even taken to calling each other Max and Grace.

  When the war is over – oh Morten, I pray that it will soon be over! Those poor people in Finland and Norway! I feel particularly sorry for them since it must be so awfully cold there.

  Grace read through the letter. It was embarrassingly bad. She scrunched it up and used it to light the stove in her office.